Need a gift for the father of your children on his special day? (Or the father of your theoretical children, as I guarantee non-fathers will appreciate the gesture as much as their child-having counterparts. It might even hasten the arrival of said children.) The Loving Wives Club may be just the thing.

Founded by four enterprising LDS wives and mothers, the Loving Wives Club is a service geared toward helping women keep the romance and novelty alive in their marriages. It was born out of the realization that moms tend to lavish time, attention, energy, and our every other resource on our children, expecting our husbands to fend for themselves. The service focuses on creating a themed romantic date monthly. By “date” I’m not talking dinner and a movie; the goal and journey is sex. To this end the ladies help us build anticipation, walk us to the bedroom door, and close it firmly after us. There is nothing indecent or inappropriate on the website. In addition to the monthly themes, the love2romance website provides suggestions for strengthening marriage. No need to clear your browsing history in case your teenager accidentaly clicks on; even the ads on the site are safe. It is admirable that Love2Romance and The Loving Wives Club do not accept any advertising dollars from products that are not in keeping with LDS standards.

For $2.99 per month, paid up front, members receive 10 month’s worth of romantic “prompts,” including a color invitation to download and print and several specific suggestions of props and activities in keeping with the months’ theme. For example, one month’s theme was Twilight, and included making an invitation on aged-looking paper and wearing lip-plumper to create a tingling sensation. The current month is “Spring Break,” “Spring” referring to what is found in mattresses and one's step as well as the season, and adapts traditional springtime activities, such as a picnic, to the bed. (You may view an entire sample prompt, “March Madness,” at the Loving Wives Club website--link below.)

The Loving Wives Club is a clever, helpful, reasonably-priced service that has the potential to strengthen and enliven a loving couple’s intimate relationship. Downsides? Not many, but I’ll share a couple of initial impressions I had. First was, What the heck? Why is it the wife’s job to cater to and coddle the man every month? Why is it all about feeding his ego? When is it his turn to make it about her? The answer? I got over it fairly quickly. Yes, both partners are equally responsible for meeting the others’needs, and I believe there should be a reciprocal service the guys can sign up for, but LWC is what it is and ought to be evaluated on its own merits. In short, I told myself to cool my latent feminist impulses. We know that serving one another, in whatever capacity we find ourselves, increases the love we feel for the recipient of our service. Regularly focusing special attention on our eternal partner in an activity that is entirely pleasurable will inevitably draw us closer to one another.

Second--while the romantic suggestions provided each month are creative the cartoons and rhymes on the invitations and prompts fall firmly within the same category as cheddar and gruyere. Cute, maybe, but definitely for a specific taste. My husband and I found the cuteness to be too silly for sexiness. However, I polled my girlfriends and asked that they try some of these with their husbands, and the result was almost universally the oppposite of my own--they and their husbands did find them clever and sexy. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the ideas provided may be adapted and expanded on rather than employed exactly as suggested. The spousal relationship is the foundation of the family. Kids’ birthday parties and baseball games are important, but the connection between wife and husband is vital. Anything that helps couples focus entirely on each other is worth checking out.

So, bottom line-- The Loving Wives Club is a creative, fun system for keeping our sex lives exciting and helping us strengthen our spouses and marriages. The price is right, and while the artwork and language is possessed of a highly specific tone, there’s nothing saying that YOUR love note has to say, "You're my main course cause you're the best at intercourse." Just say what moves ya instead. It is also nice to support an organization that holds to its standards, even though it means losing out on revenue.